On a train bound for Washington the other evening, I considered how much Baltimore is a city built atop tunnels. As we slipped into the darkness just beyond Penn Station, I smiled at how Baltimoreans grow fascinated by stories about our dank underground byways, under the harbor, downtown, the streets, even Federal Hill.
I collect tunnel stories — like the one about the kayaker who traveled the covered section of the Jones Falls, a trip that took him from a spot near Falls Road to the harbor.
I am frequently asked about train whistles we hear before the locomotives disappear and burrow under Baltimore. Friends who live at Harbor Court at Light and Lee streets told me when they lived in the front of that building, they heard police and ambulance sirens. When they moved to the back, they heard train whistles.
Some of the loudest railroad blasts I've encountered rock South Baltimore. There are a lot of trains and grade crossings here. Train engineers blast away at the grade crossings in South and Southwest Baltimore as a safety precaution. Enormous freight trains pass through the heart of Baltimore, but not in sight. They travel in the brick-lined channels.
Days before his 2009 inauguration, Barack Obama and his entourage passed through two of our longest railroad underground passages, one in East Baltimore along Hoffman Street, the other in West Baltimore that runs under Wilson Street. The tunnel opening at Bond Street was shown in some episodes of "The Wire."
Baltimore's rail tunnels have a fancy pedigree. The Howard Street Tunnel (the one where railcars caught fire a decade ago) was designed by Samuel Rea, later president of the Baltimore & Ohio's rival, the Pennsylvania Railroad. It was Rea and his stewardship that later gave the Pennsy its own tunnels into Manhattan. The Howard Street Tunnel was built by John B. McDonald, whose next job was building New York's Interborough Rapid Transit.
Rea's task was to route the railroad through Baltimore on something known as the Belt Line, a route that cuts along 26th Street in Waverly, Charles Village and Remington, and eastward to Bayview. It is pounded by long freight trains almost hourly. It is also the source of many of the whistles we hear, but certainly not all.
Some tunnels were not long, and not all carried trains. There was a curious Hutzler's department store shoppers' tunnel under Saratoga Street. It linked the main store with another set of buildings that housed the toy department, garage and a soda fountain. The store claimed another tunnel as well. When you were seated in the basement luncheonette, you could hear the B&O trains pass. True tunnel trivia: both President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Queen Elizabeth were passengers aboard trains that traveled beneath Howard Street.
Another pedestrian tunnel was off-limits to all but a few trusted federal employees. This was the passage under Calvert Street at Lexington that connected the old Federal Reserve Bank with the old Post Office. It was built so that securities could be transferred unnoticed. I am told about, but have not seen, tunnels that run under the Johns Hopkins University's Homewood campus.
We also have sealed and decommissioned tunnels. There is a concrete passage, constructed between 1926 and 1927, 160 feet long and 30 feet wide, under 29th Street in the Remington neighborhood. It was once used by passenger and freight trains of the Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad, that wonderful little steam railroad that wound through Roland Park, Woodbrook, Rodgers Forge, Towson, Glen Arm, Fallston and on to Bel Air, ending at York, Pa. This one now carries an elaborate sewer pipe.
In 1992, one of Baltimore's oldest legends was verified with the discovery of more than 200 feet of white-walled tunnels under Federal Hill's north slope facing the Inner Harbor. Construction workers located the entrance to a 19th-century commercial sand mine, a multichambered vein under the park's slope. Researchers speculate that the sand was quarried for use in the manufacture of high-quality glassware.